Tax preparation applications have become very popular and allow a user, such as a taxpayer or a tax professional, to prepare and electronically file a tax return using a computer. While tax preparation applications have greatly simplified preparation of tax returns, importing data into the electronic tax return can sometimes be confusing, particularly when data is imported from another program, such as an accounting or finance program, and into the tax preparation application.
For example, it is known to manually map data of an accounting application to a particular line of a tax form of a tax preparation application utilizing a tax line assignment (TLA). For this purpose, a user selects a particular account of the accounting application and manually associates or assigns a TLA to that account. The manually assigned TLA identifies or refers to a tax form and line thereof in which data of the account should be entered when account data is imported into the tax preparation application.
While users may effectively manually assign TLAs to accounts of an accounting application, doing so can be complicated, confusing, tedious, time consuming and prone to user error. For example, the accuracy of manually assigned TLAs may depend upon the user's knowledge and the ability of the user to link the proper TLA to the account. Sometimes, this analysis is too “taxy” and beyond the user's understanding. These issues may arise multiple times if the user manually assigns tax information to multiple accounts.